True Halloween story: I'm not a big believer in ghosts, spirits and the like, but KT and I both attest the following story is 100% truth.
In 1993 we moved from our beloved Beard Ave S. apartment to a bigger place, a house near 50th and Xerxes in SW Minneapolis. On the day before we moved in, KT, Al (two years old at the time) and I headed over to our new digs to determine all the things that need to be determined (who got what room, what cleaning needed to be done, etc.). To distract Al, we had gone to Blockbuster (remember those?) and picked up a few Barney videotapes for him to zombie out in front of while KT and I went about our tasks. With the videotapes (remember those?) came the requisite helium balloon that Blockbuster gave every snot-nosed kid that walked through the door.
Our new house was, upon our arrival, completely empty. The only contents were what we brought: a television, VCR (remember those?), Barney videos and the balloon. The balloon, it should be noted, was on it's last gasps of helium induced life. Instead of hanging out near the ceiling, it merely hovered a few inches off the ground - it hadn't threatened to float away for several hours. We propped Al up in front of the television on the ground floor our our house, balloon next to him, and went upstairs to determine what we should do first. To get upstairs from where Al was sitting required two half flights of stairs and two turns. We were lamenting how difficult it was going to be to drag our king size bed up this cryptic stairway. Once upstairs, another turn was required to enter the hallway which led to the three bedrooms and bathroom. KT and I were halfway down the hallway, in the first bedroom on the right, which we had determined would belong to Al, discussing whether or not to put plastic over the windows when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. KT must have seen it at the same time as our conversation abruptly stopped and we both turned our attention to the doorway. There, we saw the previously lifeless and limp balloon, floating at eye level. It hovered in the doorway for a few seconds before slowing entering the room. Then, it proceeded to make a slow yet deliberate circle around the room, maintaining it's eye-level height. KT and I stood in stunned silence and watched. After circling the room, the balloon headed back for the door. We instinctively followed.
Leaving the room, the balloon turned sharply left and slowly floated (always at eye-level) towards the stairs. We continued to follow, too stunned to say a word. The balloon casually floated down half the stairway, turned the corner, and floated down the rest of the way to the main level of the house. Once it reached the main level of the house, the balloon turned two more corners to return to the room where it began it's journey. KT and I continued to follow it, mouths agape. Al, still mesmerized by the giant purple dinosaur, never noticed his balloon had gone missing. The balloon floated to the center of the room (still at eye-level) to a spot directly above where it had previously been. It then slowly descended to the exact same spot a few inches above the ground it was sitting when we went upstairs. It never moved again.
KT and I were, to put it mildly, freaked out. We considered not moving in after all and begging for our old apartment back, but that ship had sailed. We didn't last long in that house before moving to another. Nothing as overtly creepy as the balloon occurred again, but we did have a series of unexplainable noises and we never were able to figure out why all the bedrooms had sliding locks positioned on the outside of the doors, thus making it possible to lock people into rather than out of them.
I'm still skeptical of ghosts, ghouls and goblins, but I have never been able to come up with any possible explanation for this event. The simply is no logical explanation, which only leaves the illogical.
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